indyfabz

Chuck M 

The reason I enjoy your posts more than the other crap posters is you post pictures. We deserved to see how the golf club problem was solved and I have yet to see Larry's aero bar system. But here is a fine photo of the best vodka dumpster diving can produce.

Mojo31

A very nice music listening room as well.

indyfabz

Looks like something out of “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Mojo31

I was thinking it looked like something out of Hoarders.

hazetguy 

well? don't leave us hanging. we need the results of your epic weekend! (and please fill us in on the total cost of your entry fees, TIA).

our hero can be seen at ~0:15 here, showing the departure on the slow roll, obviously well before the solo breakaway sprint and eventual stage victory:

WhyFi

This has been nagging at me since the first post - can it really be said that he won the slow roll?

When I first saw the thread title, I was ready to be shocked and impressed, thinking that he was the last to roll across the line in a "race" more like a track stand competition. Getting to the finish line first, when the stated intent is to go slow, seems like coming in last place, rather than first, IMO.

seypat

He actually got the Latern Rouge!

Chuck M 

I may be showing my age... But I thought it had a Sanford and Son vibe.

indyfabz

LarrySellerz

https://imgur.com/gallery/BVEf0GY

beng1

That's the garage. Each spring I try to set up a hi-fi using cheap or free components. I got the complete set of Kenwood components along with two cartons of L&M light 100s for $20 at a local estate-sale, and found the Fisher speakers on the curb several blocks away, someone had set them out for trash. I sold the cigarettes for three bucks a pack in the town square one day so if you don't count my time working sales and cleaning the tar off the components with Fantastik, I am about forty bucks ahead. Sounds superb, turntable even has a good needle.

beng1

Life hack; You don't need entry fees to ride events if you don't register and just ride anyway. They ARE public roadways, if you happen to be riding at the same time someone else is holding an event on the same road..........

Anyway, you can see by the schedule the events were poorly organized, some on the same day, some within just a few hours of each other while being miles away from one another, some events simply lame like the "grape escape" for wine-snobs.

I have no recollection of Friday July 29th, and i found no notes left to myself to shed light on what happened that day. I asked my wife if she knew what I had done that day and she had no memory of my activities either. Weird but it happens often enough, someday I will look into that.

Saturday the mountainbike race was the cool choice. I won the event before it started by being the only one to ride their MTB to the event. I left early on the the nearly 100% chro-mo Marin so I could get there a few hours early and psych out the competition. On the way there a number of wimps passed me in their Cages with their bikes in or racked to their Cages. It was only a dozen miles ride to the event for me, I thought to myself "don't these guys want to be warmed up for the race???" Weird, especially with the price of gasoline.





I rode to the event with no helmet of course, but I did wear the shirt I got from the last NORBA race I entered in the 1990s, which I had run with the chro-mo Marin. I had a bottle of water on the bike, and a bag of chips and a small bottle of water in my messenger bag along with some pretzels, a crescent wrench, tire irons and a spare tube, that was my entire "kit".
All of the bikes the racers had trucked to the event looked odd, mostly made of plastic, only one front chainwheel and many with names I had never seen before. I talked to one guy who had a bike called a Pivot??? It was an all plastic full-suspension bike and he said he had $5000 in it, and it weighed more than my Marin, I was stunned at how heavy it was and told him so. Of course he had a bunch of computer crap on it and it had the freakishly large wheels which have been foisted on the public as a marketing stunt in recent years. Yeah, I am going to dump cash on a new bike because it's wheels are a few inches bigger, right.....
So I had never ridden this track before or even been to the park it was in before,and they announced they wanted to clear the trail of walkers and riders for the first event so of course I was not going to enter the actual race and risk maiming my 60 year-old body or hold-up the riders who were much younger and which many had practice on this track. I heard one mention the time they were lapping it in practice, others talking about how they knew who they would finish ahead of and behind etc.. I talked to a guy sitting on his tail-gate who said he was not racing either, as he had done a four-plus hour ride the day before at a good clip. I asked him how fast his average speed on the ride was and he said a bit over 18mph, and I replied "That is pretty good for your age, was that the B or C ride?", but he turned and started talking to someone else so I found better things to do.
The most impressive part of the race was watching this 14 year-old kid on a plastic full-suspension bike warming up around the parking lot, doing wheelies, stoppies, bunny-hops two-feet high with ease, and coming off a stoppy coasting backwards then spinning his bike around so it was going forwards. Every other rider was psyched out by this show, and this kid entered and I think won the expert race against much older and bigger riders. I think he weighed about 100 pounds bike included. He was like a ballet dancer on wheels.
So I watched the race a bit, talked to a few people about the sport, then told somebody's small child to grab me one of those hamburg buns they were getting ready for the riders after the race, whoofed it down for some quick energy and took off for home. It was getting late and I told the wife I would be home for supper. I had only twelve hours to get ready for the Sunset Ride the next morning which was supposed to start at 6:15AM, and it was going to take place on a route I rode very often, and which used to be home to a popular time-trial event in years past I participated in.





Again, I was Riding to this event, I left the house before 6am no lights,no helmet, but the sky was starting to brighten in the East. There was almost no automobile traffic so it was fine. To get onto the park the ride was taking place on you have to go down a long, steep hill with a sweeping turn to the right in the middle. The turn usually slows the dorks in their Cages down to 30-35mph max. It was a cold morning, under 60 degrees, which I was not used to. I was wearing some T--shirt as usual with cut-off sheer dress-pants, so my teeth were chattering on the fast ride to the venue. As I approached the steep hill there were headlights behind me, I did have a white baseball cap on for safety, I knew it would show up well in the dark. It was time to race this Cage down this hill so I shifted into 8th gear and spun the bike up, once gravity grabbed hold I just got aero and held on. The Cage turned out to be a new shiny black 4wd crew-cab pickup with a bike racked to the back, it tried passing me in the left lane but when the turn came up he tapped his brakes to keep his speed down and I was of course picking up speed like mad, I am guessing all of 35mph, maybe more, the bike started to wobble while I was going down the hill next to the truck, not because of any mechanical issue, but my teeth were still chattering a bit and I had a slight bout of the shivers and it was feeding into the handlebars, but it was not serious. Out of the turn and the last part of the hill that dumped into the park was straight, so you would think the truck would speed up, but it did not have the nuts to because there were well-marked speed-bumps on the entrance to the park to slow down traffic next to the hot-dog stand where a few pedestrians and cyclists had been hit by vehicles over the years, so because I was able to thread the Huffy between one of the speed-bumps and some fencing on the side of the curb I pulled into the lead, by the second of two speed bumps I had slowed enough I was comfortable lofting the front wheel and getting up off the seat and going right over it at speed. I was handily ahead of the truck now so cut over in front of it into the left lane, necessary so I could cross the on-coming lanes and slip off onto a side-road which was one-way the wrong-way, but nobody on bikes ever pays much attention to that as it is a sort of short-cut to the first beach bath-house where they start most of the sports events that take place on the park, and is also well known as a meeting place for men seeking physical encounters with other men.

So that was my first win of the event. I rolled into the parking area and rode up and down the row of Cages where their owners who were afraid to ride in the dark had driven their cycles to the event. As I rode by them, up and down the row, I stared at them with a poker-face. The cage I had raced down the hill in the dark was there, and it's owner acted busy unloading his cycle and would not make eye-contact with me, I considered that the second time I dropped him that morning, there would be a third.

Before long there was some "organizer" type of person on a PA blah-blah-blah about the event and herding the hoard over to the starting area. The advertised "goal" of the event was to ride to a certain pier on the lake and see the sunrise, which did not make sense as it was already coming up as they were starting the event and the riders were over six-miles from the alleged scenic area. But I knew where the real game was. In the parking lot I noticed there were a pair of riders wearing pro-looking kits, one of them on a Pinarello, the other on some other racy looking bike with drops and "aero" rims, the brand of I had never seen before. At the start of the stage these two characters were right at the front of the pack and they took off at a very good clip. I quickly dispatched the herd, but the Pinarello and company I actually had to get aero on the drops to catch up to, then one of them was in the right lane and one in the left so I could not pass easily. Team tactics! Well one of them gave me an opening and I took it and squeezed up beside them. The pace was fast and I was worried about burning out at the beginning and falling off my pace, so I just kept aero and stayed in the easy 52/19 seventh gear and slowly crept ahead of Team Pinarello, both members of which were substantially younger, they both had hair and none of it looked silver!!!!
The wind was favorable with the direction we were heading and for some reason I felt good so I snicked it up into the 52/18 eighth and spun that up to quite a speed and did not look back for a long time, until one or two miles later at the end of a long straight, and there was nothing to be seen, I had broken away handily and was far, far in the lead.

The effort started to wind me so I kept my cool, shifted back down to seventh and took it a bit easy. I was not sure where the scenic area was the group was supposed to pause at, so I turned down a side-road at the first sign I saw that had the word "pier" on it and rode down to the end. Drat! It was the wrong area, facing West so no seeing a sunrise there, they had tricked me! I quickly turned around and ran back to the main road to see Team Pinarello go by and pull an eighth mile lead. I just put my head down and slowly reeled them in again, using up valuable energy in the process, but the bonus was I got to drop them again, every cloud has a silver lining. I was taking no more chances after that point. Even though I passed by other points of interest where people were "enjoying" themselves I kept my head down and rocketed through the rest of the 12+ mile route back to the start-finish area. I coasted into the parking area sitting upright with one fist as high into the air as I could reach. There were a couple of old-looking people there who may have been starting to prepare the pancake breakfast for the registered "official" entrants of the stage, but that will be the day I will drop $35 for a stack of pancakes. So I drank my water-bottle down and sped off the way I had come. I had to drop down into first gear to climb the mountain-stage back off the park back up to the town of Millcreek, and I just had a quick four-mile sprint back home for a free breakfast in peace and quiet, probably before the also-rans got back and sat down to their overpriced bath-house pancake meal.





The Tour was over for me, as I had zero interest in making the 9am charity ride for homeless dogs. My yard was always full of homeless rabbits, what about them? I refuse to participate in events smacking of racism. With three stage wins under my belt, I had the Tour in the bag anyway even with the stages I had boycott, divested from or sanctioned.

Epilogue;
This morning I went back to 6-mile creek park where the MTB stage had been run with the Marin and first walked the race course, then road it with the Marin. It was a very good single-track ride. I had no helmet or cell-phone with me, so I could not take many risks running it, there were a number of places if botched could break bones. I can' remember how many miles exactly the course is, between four and six. The experts were running three laps of it in about eighty or ninety minutes if they were fast. What I did on it was not much exercise for an "on" day so later i jumped back on the Huffy and reeled off a fast 20 miles down and around the "sunrise" TT course again. Tomorrow is an off day before the next impromptu TT.

indyfabz

Careful what you wish for next time.

WhyFi

Is there a Cliffs Notes?

indyfabz

You just knew it was coming. At least I did.

Can you imagine enjoying spending your free time on something like that?

Mojo31

Thankfully, no.

big john

He put it in post 62 of this **** show thread.

himespau 

Plus, with his 47cm bike, he can get a lot more aero.

himespau 

Isn't that the Lanterne Rouge? I was hoping for that as well.

WhyFi

Oh. I mean, we already knew that. But thank you!

beng1

Or I am an aspiring writer of satire, but of course there is always a certain percentage of the population on the near side of the Bell Curve that mistakes it for actual reality.

Bah Humbug

We have a term for people who write "satirical" posts hoping to provoke responses.

big john

indyfabz

Don’t quit your day job unless your day job is as an aspiring satirist.